an etruscan solution to a celtic problem

7/30/2019 An Etruscan Solution to a Celtic Problem

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Maine Learning Ltd. 2009

An Etruscan Solution to a Celtic Problem

Martin CounihanUniversity of Southampton

23 January 2009

Abstract: It is argued that what used to be called"P-Celtic" arose because Etruscans could not pronounceproperly the Indo-European languages which theyencountered in and around Italy. Etruscan influencecan neatly explain not only the phenomenon of P-Celticbut also the corresponding phonological transition inOscan and Umbrian. This scenario tends to support arelatively short timescale for the dissemination anddiversification of the Western Indo-European languages.

Although today they are spoken only by small communities on the north-western fringes of Europe, the Celtic languages were once a veryimportant section of the Indo-European language family and weredistributed across a wide swath of Western and Central Europe, at onestage extending as far east as Galatia in western Anatolia. A peculiarityof the Celtic languages is that, in some of them, a reconstructed Proto-

Indo-European (PIE) labiovelar consonant, conventionally written as k

w

,developed into a qu or hard c(k) sound. In others, however, the sameoriginal kwdeveloped into ap. The former have been known as Q-Celticlanguages, and the latter as P-Celtic languages. For example, theinterrogative pronoun who had the PIE form kwos and led to the ModernIrish c but to the Welshpwy. Irish is Q-Celtic, but British (orBrittonic), whence Welsh, is P-Celtic.

The distinction between these two branches of the Celtic languages wasfirst noted by John Rhys and was a cornerstone of the prehistories ofIreland and Britain which were presented by Eoin MacNeill (1919) and byThomas ORahilly (1946). Nowadays, MacNeills and ORahillys versionsof prehistory are considered outmoded and in many ways erroneous, andthe terminology of Q-Celtic and P-Celtic has become unfashionable.One problem is that the term Celtic itself lacks an agreed definition,being used variously to denote linguistic, ethnic and cultural categories,so that it is not clear what sort of common origin, if any, might underliethe so-called Celticlanguages. Another problem is that some linguists such as Cowgill (1975) and Schrijver (1995), as mentioned by Blazek(2005) - are inclined to make light of the Q/P division and insteadconsider a more meaningful division of the Celtic languages to be between

an insular branch and a continental branch, the former grouping Irish


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and Brittonic together while the latter includes both Gaulish (P-Celtic) andCeltiberian (Q-Celtic). The insular/continental division has beensupported by Forster and Toth (2003) on the basis of a phylogeneticnetwork analysis, but Gaulish was the only continental Celtic languageincluded in their analysis. They estimated that the insular and continental

branches of Celtic diverged from one another at 3200 1500 BC.

On the other hand, Starostin (2004) has recently given some support tothe Q/P division of the Celtic languages, estimating glottochronologicallythat proto-Celtic speech divided between Q-Celtic and P-Celtic atapproximately 1100 BC. If we accept the usualfamily treeanalogy withbiological evolution, and therefore take the view that the Celtic languageshave arisen by treelike divergence over time from a common ancestor,then Starostins views are in conflict with those of Forster and Toth.

A basic question is one of randomness vs. causation. Should the kwquand kwp developments be regarded as arbitrary random alternatives?Or should one of them be considered to be the natural development, theother occurring only if caused by particular local circumstances? It shouldbe noticed that the kwp development is found not only in certain Celticlanguages but also in some of the Italic languages, notably Oscan andUmbrian, demonstrating that the Q/P division should not be regarded asjust a Celtic phenomenon. Also, the kwqu development occurred in thegreat majority of other Indo-European languages including Germanic,Latin, Hittite, and all the satem languages (Balto-Slavic and Indo-

Iranian), strongly suggesting that kw

qu was the more natural process.

Welsh and Breton are the only living P-Celtic languages today, and bothcertainly arose from the Brittonic of two thousand years ago. AlthoughForster and Toth (2003) and proponents of the palaeolithic continuitymodel such as Alinei (2003) would argue for a local insular developmentrather than migrations from the continent, it is more than reasonable toregard Brittonic as an export from Gaul, brought to Britain by invadingelites during the last half-millennium or so before Christ. Gaulish arosefrom the La Tne culture which followed the Hallstatt culture of West-

Central Europe which is usually considered to have been at its height inabout 800 BC. This is the traditional view of Iron-Age Celtic origins, andsuggests that P-Celtic speech originated early in the first millennium BC inthe core Hallstatt territory, i.e. in the areas of Austria and South Germanynorth of the Brenner and Resia Passes. Lepontic, slightly to the south-west, was also of P-Celtic type (Schmidt 1993).

At much the same time, a P-Celtic form of speech also existed in south-central Italy. The languages concerned broadly, the Sabellic languages,including Oscan and Umbrian - are usually classified as Italic, not Celtic,

but the differences between Sabellic and Hallstatt Celtic in about 800 BC


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may have been relatively small. As an example: the numeral "four" waspetorin both Oscan and in Gaulish, and today ispedwarin Welsh.

So, why should kwp have occurred when and where it did? Is it reallyreasonable to regard the kwp transition as an example of the sort of

arbitrary linguistic diversification which calls for no special explanation?Until recently it was impossible to answer these questions convincingly,but the situation has been changed by the powerful case made by Beekes(2003) that the Etruscan language was brought to Italy from north-western Anatolia about 1200 BC. It is not novel to suggest that Etruscanmay have Anatolian affinities, but Beekes work has raised the idea fromthe level of a likelihood to that of a near-certainty and has pinned downthe historical context of the migration. Considering also the results fromgenetic studies of Tuscans (Piazza 2007) and their women (Achilli 2007)and their cattle (Pellecchia 2007), it can now hardly be doubted that

Etruscan people, language and culture were brought to central Italy fromAnatolia. The date of migration was about 1200 BC in the standardchronological framework, but might have been considerably more recentif one were to adopt the radical new chronology suggested by scholarssuch as Rohl (2007) which places the fall of Troy in about 864 BC.

Sandwiched between the Sabellic and Hallstatt areas, of course, was theregion which came to be dominated by the Etruscans. The mosteconomical explanation for the kw p transition is, therefore, that it tookplace as a result of Etruscan influence. There is no reason to suppose

that any Indo-European language anywhere else displayed the kw

ptransition, except in some cases in Greek. The normal transition, kwqu, occurred everywhere else across the Indo-European world, givinginter alia proto-Irish-like languages across France and the British Isles,Celtiberian in the Iberian peninsula, and languages like Ligurian,Quariatic, Venetic and Liburnian to the south-west and south-east of theAlps. Latin and its neighbour Faliscan, exceptionally, emerged as kwqulanguages in spite of being embedded in the Etruscan zone of influence.

It is impossible to say with certainty how the Etruscans pronounced their

language at the time of their migration from Anatolia to Italy, since mostof the surviving epigraphic evidence about Etruscan dates from muchlater times. However, Watkins (2001), albeit on the basis of Hattic andHurrian, concluded that in ancient Anatolia the labiovelars were restrictedto the Indo-European languages. It is generally accepted that Etruscan inItaly did not possess the PIE kwsound. Nor did it possess the qu intowhich PIE kw regularly developed in Latin and in many other Indo-European languages this qu was a single consonant, not just a k-wconcatenation (Sturtevant, 1939). It is suggested, therefore, that PIE kwwas pronounced as ap to Etruscans for want of any more natural way in

which they could articulate it.


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Even the w(approximant) sound may have been lacking in earlyEtruscan; at any rate, it appears not to have had a distinctive sign in theEtruscan alphabet. The Etruscans borrowed the word vinum(wine)from Latin, but they may have pronounced its initial letter more like a fthan the w of the Romans. Likewise, the Etruscan word transcribed by

modern scholars as vers(fire) might have been related to, andpronounced like, the first syllable of the Latin fervor(violent heat).Furthermore, the bilabial ph (IPA ) sound may also have been outsidethe Etruscan repertoire: Hnigswald (1941) felt that for this reason theGreekAphrodite was rendered into Etruscan with a hardp instead of theph, giving the month-name which was borrowed into Latin and has comedown to us as April. These are minor points, but they bolster theargument that Etruscans would have had little choice but to pronouncePIE kwasp.

So, it appears probable that Etruscans turned PIE kwintop. In fact wehave a possible example of the PIE consonant kwdeveloping intop in aword borrowed into Etruscan:pupluna was apparently a common noun(people) as well as the name of the Etruscan coastal city now known asPopulonia. The Latinpopulus is considered to be a borrowing out againfrom the Etruscanpupluna. (Either Etruscan did not possess the osound, or its alphabet did not discriminate between o and u.)Etruscanpupluna is likely to have been a more ancient borrowing intoEtruscan from an IE language earlier than Latin, withpuplu- coming fromthe PIE root kwokwlo-, a variant ofkwekwlo-, wheel. One may ask how

the semantic shift from wheel to people could have occurred: a clue,perhaps, is that kwekwlo- is a reduplicated form of PIE kwel- ("turn","revolve") from which, by a different route through Latin, we get wordslike culture and colony(Kbler, 2000). Moreover, in Greek we havekuklos(circle, wheel), which, as in English, could mean a circle ofpeople; it could also mean a place of assembly or the wall around a city(Liddell and Scott, 1885). The etymological details are not completelycertain, but the example ofpupluna supports the notion that PIE kwgaveEtruscanp.

It is not an unusual phenomenon for the pronunciation used by aculturally-dominant minority to be picked up, consciously orunconsciously, by the dominated majority. It is suggested that this iswhy P-Celtic and the Sabellic languages underwent the kwptransition. It is difficult to overstate the cultural impact of the Etruscanson their neighbours in and around Italy. The scenario is that Etruscanmigrants, possessing Iron-Age technology and relatively sophisticatedmilitary organisation, took possession of Etruria and imposed theirlanguage on the previous inhabitants. Later, they expanded theirterritory northwards and southwards. Across the Alpine region, Etruscan-

derived alphabets came into use for inscriptions in languages includingRaetic, Lepontic and Venetic, as well as in the region to the south where


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the Sabellic languages were spoken. This does not necessarily mean thatthe Etruscans achieved the military conquest of such a large area, but itimplies a powerful cultural influence which reached the Hallstatt area andpossibly even further north. Archeologists have long been aware ofEtruscan influence on material culture in the Hallstatt and La Tne areas

(for example, Cunliffe 1994). A nice individual example is the Etruscan-style bronze flagon that was found at Castaneda in southern Switzerland,inscribed using an Etruscan-derived alphabet (Whatmough 1936). Infact, Etruscan-based alphabets were adopted in all the areas where thelocal Indo-European languages underwent the kwp transition.

With such a powerful Etruscan influence on the Hallstatt and La Tnecultures, one might expect to find loanwords from Etruscan in P-Celticlanguages. An example may be the Gaulish deity-name Esus orAisus,likely to be a borrowing from Etruscan ais, god.

A broader implication of all this is that there may have been relativelylittle variation across the Celtic and Italic language groups prior to theinfluence of the Etruscans. Western Indo-European speech at the start ofthe Iron Age would have been more homogeneous than is normallyrecognised, making it less plausible that the first dispersal of Indo-European languages in the West occurred as long ago as the NeolithicRevolution as Renfrew (1987) and, say, Gray and Atkinson (2003) wouldhave us believe.

In conclusion: the significance of the Etruscans in the development ofEuropean civilisation has probably been underestimated in the past. Theybrought the Iron Age to Italy and to the Celts, who in turn took itwestwards into France and the British Isles. The Roman conquest of Gauland Britain can even be regarded as a mere repetition of what Celticsurrogates of the Etruscans had already achieved some centuries earlier.The purpose of this paper has been to argue that the Etruscans also left alinguistic mark across Western Europe and to explain the previously-mysterious division between "P-Celtic" and "Q-Celtic". The most strikingphonological difference between Irish and Welsh is a consequence of how

proto-Celtic was pronounced by the influential Etruscans.


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References:

Achilli, A., et al. (2007) Mitochondrial DNA Variation of Modern TuscansSupports the Near Eastern Origin of Etruscans. The American Journal of

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Alinei, M. (2003) Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Palaeolithiccontinuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, withan excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis. (Expanded version of a paper readat the ConferenceAncient Settlers in Europe, Kobarid, 29-30 May2003.) Quaderni di semantica, 26.

Beekes, R. S. P. (2003) The Origin of the Etruscans. Amsterdam:Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.

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MacNeill, E. (1919) Phases of Irish History. Dublin: Gill and Son.ANTHROPOLORahilly, T. F. (1946) Early Irish History and Mythology. Dublin: DublinInstitute for Advanced Studies.

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an etruscan solution to a celtic problem

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